SurveyMonkey Now Does Mobile App Analytics

Online survey company SurveyMonkey Inc. has switched gears by buying a mobile app analytics company and using its technology to launch an app intelligence platform.

SurveyMonkey Intelligence "expands the company's existing data businesses, offering data and critical insights on more than a thousand mobile apps and the overall app economy to customers," the company said while launching the new product yesterday. "With SurveyMonkey Intelligence, app publishers can benchmark key metrics, track competitors, improve due diligence, and discover emerging mobile trends in order to make smarter business decisions."

The new direction comes via the acquisition of mobile start-up Renzu, created by app developers who sought a better way to attain competitive app data.

Leveraging their technology and wedding it to its own data services, SurveyMonkey now offers a wide gamut of mobile intelligence metrics, including: data on active users; user engagement; sessions and churn; audience data; store data such as downloads and revenue; and competitive leaderboards showing how other apps are performing.

The company gleans its information from a national sampling of iOS and Android users running different devices.

"Mobile will be the leading platform in which businesses connect with customers," said CEO Zander Lurie. "With our acquisition of Renzu and the launch of SurveyMonkey Intelligence, we're removing the barriers of time, difficulty, and cost in getting mobile app data -- just as the company did 17 years ago when it established the online survey space and democratized the feedback process."

The new service comes with a limited free tier, with paid plans starting at $79 per month.